TI adds powerline comms acceleration to Piccolo MCU line

TI adds powerline comms acceleration to Piccolo MCU line

It’s hard for MCU vendors to differentiate themselves with devices being introduced by the hundreds each year, but Texas Instruments has done a pretty good job with the new $4.95 TMS320F2806x Piccolo floating-point MCU by inserting 75 new math instructions to handle complex math functions.

B y adding this Viterbi Complex math Unit (VCU), TI aims to reduce the space and cost requirements for designers looking to quickly and efficiently add complex math capability, such as that required for PLC, real-time control and energy-efficient applications.

The VCU sits upon a host of features that include an 80-MHz core, a 32-bit floating-point Control Law accelerator (introduced with the Piccolo F2803 ( get latest Digi-Key price quote) line in 2008), full-speed USB 2.0 (host and device), CAN and DMA access, high-resolution, 150-ps PWMs, 3-MSample/s, 12-bit ADCs and three analog comparators with 10-bit reference.

By including floating-point capability with its F280x line-up, TI was responding to customer requests to close the gap between the cost and efficiency-focused Piccolo line and its high-performance Delfino line.

“Users [of the Piccolo line] wanted floating point, but not 300-MHz performance [per TI’s higher-end Delfino line, with its associated power consumption],” said Sangmin Chon, director of TI’s C2000 MCU marketing group.

The F2806 continues to close that gap and with the VCU, which, according to Chon, can implement full PLC G3 physical-layer processing up to three times faster than a software-based design. It can also accelerate a Viterbi Butterfly and trace-back functions by up to 7x and a 16-bit CRC for block lengths of 10 Bytes at up to 25x faster.

View Chon’s rundown of the F2806’s main differentiators and what they mean to you here:

For more on the VCU, its benchmarks, as well as how it works and tips on how to implement and program it, see: Product How-To: Using the TI VCU in real-time control and power applications.

Pricing and availability:

The F2806 is sampling now in 15 flavors, with memory ranges of 52 to 100 Kbytes of RAM, 128 to 256 Kbytes of flash and options for 80- and 100-pin packages.

Pricing starts at $4.95 each/1000, putting it in the same league as Microchip’s PIC32 line ( compare on ICMaster.com) .

The device comes with a $39 F2806x controlSTICK and modular controlCARD. An $11 promotional price will be available to the first 1,000 customers who order the F2806x controlSTICK through TI’s before February 14, 2011.

An F2806x Experimenter’s Kit is priced at $99.00 and orders can be immediately placed at www.ti.com/f2806x-ek-pr-es.